Mario's 8 Ball Deluxe
9 October 2009
Story date : Summer of 1983
Location : 378 St. Catherine St. West in the Belgo Building
Location : 378 St. Catherine St. West in the Belgo Building

My best friend Mike or Walter or Dave or some other buddy would usually meet me there for a beer or two or three or four etc. Other times it was just Patricia and me, and that was OK too. The number 15 bus would run all night on Ste.Cathrine between Atwater and Papineau, and so all I needed to do was make that last number 70 bus (around 2:20AM) which left Papineau metro and use to cross the Jacques-Cartier bridge. This would get me back to my basement apartment on the south shore where that long Sunday shift had started. Getting back to that super quiet, underground "home base" felt good and secure to be sure. And so, in order not to lose grasp on the memory of another day, I would write my journal entry before falling into a deep sleep as the faint signs of the dawn began to manifest themselves. I wrote quickly because I knew that everything was about to reset once again like a new game of pinball. It was the summer of 1983, I was 20, and what the hell did I care about anything at all except those types of moments!
Casino Royale was a medium size arcade with a nice variety of pinball machines for that time. Abe would constantly harass his operator/supplier/partner to bring him new machines, and he would make quite the issue out of it at that. I always knew what it was about when I heard him talking to Jack on the phone, because there was this harassing and yet pleading tone about the conversation. Abe knew his business and it showed in the numbers, no matter how annoying he managed to be. There was a very solid and steady amount of walk in traffic during the week, so much so that the weekday lunch hour crowd often consumed about $400 to $600 in quarters from 11:30 to 1:30 PM.
But let’s get back to those Sunday evenings when Casino Royale became dotted with regulars. What I remember clearly, is that after 8PM this character whom I only knew as Mario would shuffle in. He had a mustache, was about 30 years old, pretty well chain smoked duMaurier cigarettes and had a nervous and erratic twitch which would suddenly become very controlled, accentuated and focused when he played pinball. It was quite beautiful to watch his condition transform itself into some extremely well directed body English.

I also remember that Mario was polite, shy and nervous. His head would bob up and down as he grunted "hi" and shuffled up to the half door of the back office in order to get his 4 quarter fix for the evening. Sometimes I would tell him about the condition of the machines, if they had been waxed or serviced since last week. It was a moment in time that seems magical now- and I can still see him through his own cigarette smoke jumping and jerking in a nutty yet stylish manner as he would gradually and most certainly get in perfect tune with what inevitably became "his" machine. He was an impressive player, and people would notice the intensity of his moves while watching from a certain calculated distance in order to not distract him. He rarely spent more than two dollars the whole evening and would leave me the free games he had accumulated when came time for him to shuffle out and cross the street to the strip joint, around 11:30 PM. There were usually too many credits left on the machine to play by closing time, and besides that, there was the Rising Sun to attend to just a few steps away.